Exhibitor Field Guide Shipping and drayage, explained
Shipping and drayage, explained
This is the page about the bill that surprises everyone once. Getting freight to the city is one cost. Getting it the last five hundred feet is another, larger, stranger one.
Two separate industries touch your booth between your warehouse and your carpet. A freight carrier moves it to the show city. The general services contractor — the GSC — moves it from the dock to your space, stores your empty crates, and reverses it all at the end. The GSC's charge is called material handling, or drayage, and it is billed by weight, per hundredweight (CWT, per 100 pounds), usually with a minimum per shipment. The rates live in the exhibitor services manual, alongside everything else in show services.
Why drayage costs what it costs
You are not paying for distance. You are paying for a compressed logistical event: hundreds of trucks unloaded in a fixed window, by forklift crews and teamsters, into a building with limited dock doors, with every crate tracked, delivered to a numbered square, stored for days, and returned on schedule. The labor is skilled and often union — forklift operation is a regulated activity in its own right, with operator training requirements set by OSHA's powered industrial truck rules — and the whole apparatus exists for a few days. That is the mechanism. It is also why the rate per hundred pounds looks nothing like commercial freight rates.
The lever you control is weight. Every decision that removes pounds — lighter materials, renting locally instead of shipping, printing graphics near the show — is a drayage decision. This is half the argument in renting versus buying.
Advance warehouse versus direct-to-show
You have two destinations to choose from.
Advance warehouse: the GSC opens a warehouse weeks before the show. Freight sent there is received on ordinary business days, verified, and delivered to your booth before you arrive. The drayage rate is usually somewhat higher than direct, but you buy certainty: you know your freight arrived while there is still time to react.
Direct-to-show: your carrier delivers to the venue during your assigned move-in window, called a target. Slightly cheaper rate, no warehouse interval — and total dependence on your truck hitting a specific dock at a specific time.
For a first show, use the advance warehouse. The premium is the cheapest insurance you will buy. Note the warehouse also has deadlines: freight arriving after the stated cutoff pays a late surcharge, and freight arriving before the opening date may be refused.
Targets and the marshalling yard
Direct shipments do not simply drive to the building. Drivers check in at a marshalling yard — a holding lot, sometimes miles away — and are called to a dock in sequence. Trucks that miss their target window wait, get resequenced behind on-time freight, and can incur off-target surcharges; drivers who wait long enough bill detention time back to you. This is where "the booth is on a truck twenty minutes away" turns into a missed setup day. The mechanism to respect: the target date and time printed in your manual is a real appointment, and your carrier needs it, in writing, before dispatch.
Weight, dimensions, and packaging
Two billing systems care about your freight's size and shape. Your carrier bills by dimensional weight when your shipment is bulky but light — volume divided by a dim factor, charged if it exceeds actual weight. The GSC bills actual weight from a scale ticket, but classifies the shipment by packaging.
Packaging classification matters more than people expect:
- Crated freight — forkliftable crates and skids — gets the base rate.
- Special handling — mixed loads, loose pieces, shipments requiring ground unloading or that cannot come off by forklift — is surcharged, commonly by 25 to 50 percent over base. A pile of loose cartons in a rental truck is the classic trigger.
- Uncrated or pad-wrapped freight rates higher still.
One consolidated, crated, clearly labeled shipment is billed better and lost less often than five loose ones. Label every piece with show name, exhibitor name, and booth number.
Small packages and empties
Most manuals have a small-package rate for parcels under a stated weight arriving by parcel carrier — cheap for a few boxes, but per-package, so a dozen parcels can out-cost one crate. During the show, marked empty crates are stored free under your drayage fee; you label them with "EMPTY" stickers and they vanish until teardown, which is why teardown patience appears on the first-show checklist. Budget all of this from the manual's actual rate card, as laid out in budget.
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